2 haiku in Mycenaean Linear B, ancient Greek, English and French, believe it or not! Believe it!
Tag Archive: sheep
Rita Roberts’ translation of Knossos tablet KN 906 Da 02 corrected, livestock from the marketplace:
This is one of three tablets which Rita Roberts had to translate to qualify for her second year of university. This tablet is the easiest of the three, on an ascending scale of difficulty. Rita achieved the excellent mark of 91 % = A + for this tablet. Congratulations, Rita!
The other two tablets are extremely challenging, even for experts in Linear B.
Translation of Linear B tablet KN 903 Da 01 by Rita Roberts:
Here we have Rita Roberts’ translation of Linear B B tablet KN 903 Da 01. In her own decipherment, Rita translated Watoakoraya as a personal name of a shepherd or herdsman, but this is clearly wrong, because akoraya is genitive singular and means “from the market” and Wato is archaic dative singular for Watos, which is a place name. So the proper translation is “from the market at Watos”. Otherwise, her translation is sound.
Rita Roberts’ translation of Linear B tablet KN 911 D e 01 (Knossos):
This is one of the most complex Linear B tablets Rita Roberts has ever had to translate. She also provided a running free translation of this tablet, but I have had to omit it for lack of space in the graphics file. In other words, if I had included her free translation, the graphics file would have been much too long to display properly. As it stands, it is already very long. One of the prime characteristics of a small subset of Linear B tablets, mostly from Pylos, but in this case from Knossos, is that they are long lists of names, in this case, shepherds taking care of their sheep. Rita Roberts makes the following observations on this tablet.
Notes:
This Linear B tablet 911 De 0l (LXX) is a lengthy inventory of hundreds of ewes, billy goats, she goats and rams, I would imagine it is of special interest for Knossos palace. It is difficult to say whether all these animals were brought together at the same time for any specific purpose. If so there are a few reasons to suggest why this could be. The first would be, having to check the stock for health reasons for the possible move to a new pasture. Secondly, it could be that the animals needed to be organized for shearing, also some for slaughter. My final suggestion is, maybe some animals were for possible export. However, these are a few possible reasons for such a large inventory, but on the whole it is a comprehensive inventory for the palace.
I may as well admit that I passed this tablet onto Rita as I am constitutionally lazy when it comes to deciphering long tablets. However, this is not the only reason. It is vital that Rita master (subjunctive) complex tablets that pose a huge challenge. This one certainly does.
RESEARCH paper: Supersyllabograms in the agricultural sector of the Mycenaean economy, by Rita Roberts academia.edu:
This essay constitutes Rita Robert’s first foray into major research in ancient Mycenaean linguistics on academia.edu. Rita has composed this highly scholarly article as the major component of her mid-term examination in her second year of university, exactly half way to her degree. Keeping up this pace, she is bound to perform outstandingly in her final essay of her second year, and in her third year thesis paper, which will be considerably more demanding than this study, and about twice as long.
I strongly recommend you to download this study here:
It makes for engaging reading in ancient linguistics research.
You can reach Rita’s academia.edu account here to view her other papers:
Rita Robert’s translation of an extremely challenging Linear B tablet, KN 903 D a 01:Linear B Latinized: Line 1: Watoakoraya + ideogram for “rams” 60 + ideo for “ewes” 270 + ideo for aiza = billy goat 49 Line 2: ideogram for “she goat” 130 + ideo for siaro = “boar” 17 + ideo for sow 41 + ideo for tauro -or- toro = “bull/ox” + ideo for “cow” 4 Decipherment: Line 1: From the market in Wato (or: from the town market), 60 rams and 270 ewes plus 49 billy goats Line 2: along with 130 she goats plus 17 boar plus 41 sows 2 bulls and 4 cows
We have a new student of Mycenaean Linear B, our third, Dante Aramideh of Holland:
We have a new student of Mycenaean Linear B, our third, Dante Aramideh of Holland. Here are Dante’s first 2 translations.
She is 17 years old, and the youngest of our 3 students, the first being Rita Roberts of Crete, who is the senior of the three, and who has been with us since 2014, and who is by far our most advanced student, being as she is in her second year of university studies. Our second student to come on board is Thalassa Farkas of Canada, whose age falls in between that of Dante Aramideh and Rita Roberts. Thalassa is making rapid progress in learning how to decipher Mycenaean Linear B, as attested by her translation of these two tablets:
Both Dante and Thalassa are familiar with alphabetical ancient Greek, while Rita Roberts is learning it.
Easy PreyMatthew 18:12 What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? Since Hell’s self resurrected on the mad, the sane dare not consort with the insane, unless they find themselves as ironclad in mind as soul to shear across the grain of equipoise and suffer the untold, to cast themselves on Sinai’s desert rocks, to wander off and stray beyond the fold where they’ll fall easy prey to Satan’s hawks. But pause... and ask yourself if you’d submit to humiliation, the same embraced by martyrs such as they, or counterfeit, and by the latter token be defaced. The wolf has left his lair, and shall attack the sane and the insane... and can’t turn back. Richard Vallance, January 9, 2017
2 haiku about sheep in Mycenaean Linear B, ancient Greek, English & French